Version 2.0

Making it Count: Four Examples, Five Years Later

In version 1.0 of the article, three out of the four web writers I discussed
as examples were seeking tenure. (Virginia Montecino was not on the tenure
track at George Mason University.) So where are they now?

Montecino retired two years after we corresponded about her site Education
and Technology Resources, presumably with the same visiting professor
position she held at the time.

As I discussed in version 1.0, tenure at Eastern Michigan is largely
a faculty union matter, meaning it was clear to me that
I would earn tenure and promotion long before I claimed my
"Computer Teaching Tips" as part of my case. The same
can be said for promotion: I expect to be promoted to Professor at
the beginning of the 2007-08 school year. For better or worse, the
scholarly requirements for tenure at EMU are modest. There
are pros and cons to such modest requirements, but I contended in
2002 that most community colleges, colleges, and regional universities
in this country have requirements that are more similar to EMU's than
the fabled publish-or-perish demands of Research I or Research II institutions,
and I still contend this is the case.

Lee Honeycutt earned tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor
at Iowa State University. In email correspondance for this revision,
he said that he thought his hypertextualized
version of Aristotle's Rhetoric helped his case "as
several external reviewers believed the site was comparable to a
'critical edition' work. But online work such as this cannot be
the only standard. Candidates for tenure still need to show evidence
of traditional scholarship in print journals" (electronic mail
communication, June 12, 2007). Interestingly though, his previous
self-published web work seems to have laid the foundation for recognition
of his more current self-published web work, Quintilian's
Institutes of Oratory. Honeycutt wrote, "Though I
had not discussed (the Quintilian site), my department listed the
site in a 'books and other works' category when compiling
our department bibliography this year" (electronic mail communication,
June 12, 2007).

Daniel Anderson earned tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor
at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In email correspondence,
Anderson wrote "I think having technology be a part of my job
portfolio helped a bit when it came to getting promoted for tenure.
It allowed me to use articles and textbooks as my traditional scholarship
by layering them over a foundation of lots of technology innovation
that could be pitched as one of the main reasons for my hire. So,
the argument was, the hire was for tech innovation--that is there--and
on top of it, look at these books and articles" (electronic
mail communication, June 12, 2007).

So for the three of us who were seeking tenure, the conclusion of claiming
our self-published web work has been both good news and no
news. For all three of us, our self-published web sites were modest
positives for our individual cases for tenure and promotion. These sites
certainly were not seen as negatives on our records. On the
other hand, the results of our tenure cases also amounts to what we
might call no news, since
both Honeycutt and Anderson mention the presence of other more traditional
scholarly work on their CVs. The same was true in my own situation as
well. In other words, I think it's fair to say that all three of us would
have still been awarded tenure and promotion even if we had not claimed
our web work as part of our tenure and promotion cases. We were not truly
case studies of the positive benefits of self-published web sites being
counted as scholarship, simply because the more conventional print-based
scholarship that all of us did (and continue to do) meant that our colleagues
did not have to seriously weigh the value of our web work as non-traditional
scholarship.